Five times dumber

Poe’s Law states that “without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake it for the genuine article.” The problem is that some Creationists really are so crazy that they can’t be parodied. I’m beginning to think that Poe’s Law needs to be adapted to apply to prescriptivism as well as Creationism; you would be hard-pressed to find a grammar claim so absurd that no grammarian would say it.

I mention this because of Gene Weingarten’s Chatological Humor, a chat on the Washington Post website. Weingarten is a humor writer for the Post, but he apparently feels strongly about grammar; his chat alternates between jokes and weird complaints about language usage. Given that the rest of chat is clearly intended to be humorous, it’s difficult to tell if he intends his grammatical advice to be humorous as well. The problem is that, as per Poe’s Law, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish honest insane complaints about grammar from facetious insane complaints. As a result, I’m slightly uncomfortable with deriding his grammatical beliefs. After all, there’s nothing that makes you look dumber than getting riled up about obvious satire.

Let’s go for it anyway. On the October 28 chat, Weingarten asks if there is something wrong with the sentence

(1) The drawing of the succubus was five times bigger than the drawing of the incubus.

Is there? Weingarten apparently thinks so:

“Something can’t be five times bigger than something else. It can be five times as big. “Bigger” allows only addition, nut [sic] multiplication as the modifying factor. “Five times bigger” is meaningless.”

This is insane on its face. First, math and grammar generally shouldn’t mix. That’s why Matt Lane (of Math Goes Pop!) and I no longer speak to each other. But seriously, what the devil is this even supposed to mean? I’m not even going to try to interpret the difference between addition and multiplication in bigger, because it’s so very obvious that this is completely wrong.

Five times bigger isn’t meaningless. I understand it, and I’m willing to bet that you do too. The only question is whether five times bigger means something that is 500 or 600% the size of the reference point. (From the examples I found from searching “exactly * times bigger” on Google, it looks like 500% is the standard interpretation.) But this uncertain interpretation just indicates that five times bigger is chock full of meanings, not meaningless.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

Yeah, as if it would be a tremendous improvement to say “Our destiny is not pre-determined. In fact, we have no destiny. Rather, we have a future that we will write ourselves.” Sure, that might be more accurate or more complete, but it’s rhetorically crap. So many of the greatest quotes in this world are illiteracies, and I, for one, wouldn’t trade them for the world.

Another bit of evidence that there’s no real confusion: In my experience, if you want someone to interpret “five times bigger” as “600 percent” you have to explain it carefully and repeatedly. It’s not an “ambiguity” that arises naturally — it’s one that has to be tortured into existence.

What about “five times less” or “five times smaller”? I’ve seen “less” on a cell phone commercial (in an instance when it really should have been “fewer,” but that’s another rant altogether) and it bugs me. Is the intent to imply division rather than multiplication, and if so, why use the word “times”? Are we talking about multiplying by 1/5, or what?

Jennifer: Yes, exactly. There’s no other handy word or phrase that fits that meaning without requiring you to restate the whole thing. Sure, you can say “One-fifth as much,” but that sounds a little stiff and formal. And just look at this nice symmetry:

Years ago when the world was less electronically mobile, one of our local TV stations debuted a news helicopter and began touting its ability to bring us live coverage from said machinery. Not to be outdone, another affiliate debuted two news helicopters, and announced that they were (actual slogan) “Twice as Live.”

Jennifer: Well, “less” could have been correct if the reduced object could be viewed as a mass noun. And I could see “X times less” sounding slightly odd, but surely no odder than other fixed phrases in English like “the bigger, the better”.

Jonathon: Symmetry, arithmetic symbols… man, this is getting to be a math blog. Which leads to the next comment:

matt: There’s nothing for you here. Go back to elliptic curves or votign systems or whatever your thing is these days.

Bill: I swear there was a news station in Pittsburgh that had some other equally stupid slogan when I was a kid. I remember being inconsolably irate about it. I suppose, looking back on it, that that was probably a seminal moment in my life, and probably a large part of why I’m the way I am now. Wow, free therapy!